joanna bujes wrote:
>
> You don't
> have to have seen "Bicycle Thief". It's in video.
>
I've had a nearly 50 year argument with others and with myself over the close of "Bicycle Thief." The film wonderfully details the utter failure of every possible source of support and order in the protagonist's world -- police, party, neighborhood, church, even the humanity as a whole (street crowds at beginning and end). Then (one interpretation) order and harmony in the world are restored with restored love of father and son as the two walk off hand-in-hand into the sunset. As in Arnold's "Dover Beach" -- which gives us a powerful vision of chaos, "rescued" by the "Ah love, let us be true to one another."
A grad-school friend defended both film and poem on the grounds that the endings of both were ironic -- that the inadequacy of the "resolution" was the very 'point' of it.
Anyone have comment.
Carrol